UPDATE 7/31/2012 - Since this post new versions of SQL Server & Visual Studio have been released. To install the latest version of SQL Server see SQL Server Install . For more information on working with SQL Server Local DB in Visual Studio 2012 see...

Note: This information has been updated since original posting and now applies to Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 RTM. For information on deployment enhancements with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 (LightSwitch V2) please see LightSwitch IIS Deployment...

UPDATE 10/17/2013: This post was updated to include the latest LightSwitch version in Visual Studio 2013 and HTML Client. UPDATE 8/12/2012: This post was updated to include LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012. There’s a ton of information out there on building...

Last year we built a business application for order management for Northwind Traders on the Office and SharePoint platform using Visual Studio 2008 and Office & SharePoint 2007. Lately I’ve been writing articles that show how to upgrade it to Office...

Today I spent way too long trying to enable remote network connections on my SQL 2008 Express database running on my Vista development machine so I thought I'd post the steps here. Please note that these settings may NOT be appropriate for your production...

As you can probably tell from my last couple posts I've been working with WPF in different data scenarios. Yesterday I was playing with data validation in WPF and .NET 3.5 which is pretty slick. In this article I'll walk through how to hook up validation...

One really handy thing to do with relational data is to import and export it to Excel. This can be a total snap using LINQ to XML in Visual Basic 2008. For example, let's say I want to import data from an Excel spreadsheet into a local database file like...

I’ve posted before about how to use TableAdapters to update parent-child (master-detail) relationships against SQL server. It’s pretty straightforward and Visual Studio generates all the code for you to properly insert, update and delete your data. However...

Note: This post has been updated for Beta 2 on 3/24/2011
LightSwitch has a really nice feature on data grids that allow you to export them to Excel if running as a Desktop application (out of browser).
This gives you a basic way of getting data...

In previous posts this month I showed how to use LINQ to SQL classes with a couple different Combobox data binding scenarios. (You can read those articles here and here .) Today I'm going to show you how to create a one-to-many data entry form (and we...

Awesome! This morning we released Visual Studio 2012 which has a ton of new LightSwitch enhancements like the ability to access data from any OData source as well as create OData services , a new theme , and a whole lot more . For a good rollup of content...

In this post I wanted to pull together some command tips that seem common when building features into the screens in your business applications. Some of them are floating around on the LightSwitch forums, community blogs, and samples but I thought having...

When designing WPF Windows with data (or as I usually refer to them WPF "Forms") we have many options on how we want to load the data and bind our controls. Depending on where the data is coming from and how it's being used there are a lot of...

This week I worked through a good article on getting started with ADO.NET Data Services (a.k.a Astoria) called Using ADO.NET Data Services . If you're not familiar with the technology it's basically a framework for exposing your data models via RESTful...

Last year after BUILD I posted Exciting Times for .NET and since then I have had the pleasure of working much closer with the .NET team, which includes the runtime, framework, languages & compilers. Although my focus has been a lot more on internal...

Today I thought I would talk about a really common scenario in data applications, creating a master-details (one-to-many) data entry form. I’ve written about WPF data binding and Entity Framework a lot in the past:
Posts:
Master-Details with...

Last week Grid Logic released a FREE LightSwitch extension called the Office Integration Pack which has quickly risen to the second most popular LightSwitch extension on VS Gallery ! It lets you populate documents and spreadsheets with data, create email...

In the last few posts on LINQ to SQL I've showed how to set up an object model using the O/R designer and how to handle a couple data binding scenarios with Comboboxes here and here . Last post on this topic we implemented a one-to-many data entry form...

It’s extremely common to have to hook up lookup tables on your data entry forms in order to populate foreign keys in a database. I’ve talked about how to do this in Winforms and WPF with Datasets and LINQ to SQL before: How Do I: Create a Lookup Combobox...

The other day a good friend of mine asked me if it was possible to send appointments created in Outlook into a SharePoint calendar list. It’s easy enough to grab this data from Outlook by building an add-in with Visual Studio, but what also turned out...

I've been getting asked a lot lately about how to easily attach a local SQL Server/Express database file (.MDF file) to an instance of SQL Server (any edition) . In most of my samples I distribute local SQL Server databases and use user instance connection...

In my previous posts on LINQ to SQL I showed how to build LINQ to SQL classes and set up the data binding in your Windows applications. If you missed them:
Related Data Binding and ComboBoxes with LINQ to SQL
Creating Lookup Lists with LINQ to SQL...

I've been noticing a lot of questions on the forums related to Winforms data binding and the ComboBox and I thought I'd post something up here to help people out. In fact data binding, or what we call “Windows Forms over Data” is a huge, sometimes misunderstood...

In a previous post I showed how to set up related data binding using ComboBoxes against DataSets and a loyal reader asked how this would be done using LINQ and Visual Studio 2008. I assume he meant LINQ to SQL in this case, because remember LINQ can be...